Dead for a Ducat.

It’s still there, 74 days, and counting, later. “It” is a dead bumblebee, on its back, shrunken and desiccated in death, resting in plain view on a ledge beside the back door of the shop. It’s huge, waxy, pandirectional eyes are staring at me in an odd memento mori, announcing that he’s waiting for me, for us all, in the undiscovered country.

Why, one might ask, don’t I just sweep it up and throw it away? Because I’m conducting an experiment of sorts: I’m seeing just how long it takes for anyone else to sweep it up and throw it away (and for all I know they’re doing the same with me). After 74 days, I’m beginning to suspect that I might not live long enough to find out.

Furthermore, I’m learning quite a lot from this bee, and the running critique on human nature that he’s (or she’s, as I have no idea how entomological gender biology works) providing for me. It has been, and continues to be, an extraordinary ten week seminar.

The principal idea that this dead insect is conveying is that if people are going to notice and correct a change for the worse in the general state of cleanliness, they’re going to do so almost immediately. Once material objects go unnoticed and unaddressed for a sufficient chronological span, the tendency seems that they become part of the furniture—part of the landscape, even. It is hardly revolutionary psychology to note how the human brain has a curious method of assimilating objects once they cease to be novel, stuffing them into the vast mnemonic file called, “well, it was there yesterday.” This is why people can drive from home to work and back on the freeway and later be able to tell you almost nothing about the experience: the interstate, after the third or fourth time one has driven it, simply becomes a chapter from memory and no longer a new, interesting, or vital experience. There exists little likelihood that it will be much different today or tomorrow from how it was yesterday, so people simply react to it from memory, with just enough awareness fixed at the level of immediate consciousness to avoid crashing into the other cars. From a practical and utilitarian point of view, this type of activity is really pretty benign, but from a philosophical or spiritual perspective, the implications are somewhat more troubling: in doing so, one misses out on an awful lot of the minutiae that makes life interesting.

The intellectual negligence that I’m describing, regarding a thing as small and unseemly as a former social insect, certainly doesn’t end with wee and dismissible bits of matter. This is the phenomenon by which citizens of Switzerland and Nepal find nothing noteworthy or spectacular about the Alps or the Himalayas, how Londoners ride the bus to work past Big Ben and see a large clock telling them that they’re late, or go to church at St. Paul’s and find it the most pedestrian church in the world, wonder what the gawking tourists see in it, and sit through service as bored as anyone in the most truly uninspired of newer Episcopal buildings. It’s how fishermen on trawlers find nothing at all grandiose or inspiring about the pitch and yaw of a ship on the ocean, or indeed the sprawl of the ocean itself: while the witnessed phenomena are unchanged, the person receiving sensory input has changed. It is as if wonder and novelty are inextricably entwined.

In a perplexing way, the human brain seem to be offended by the concept of wonder, as if it is a cutting intellectual insult to be presented with something beyond its ability to effectively name and categorize, define and comprehend—something to simply admire rather than master. So as a gesture of spite it simply blinds itself to things that are beyond its grasp or outside the scope of what it deems compelling, as a means to isolate itself from the sensory overload that is the concept of amazement. We call things death, or ocean, or mountain, or God, or universe, so that we now have a working concept much more comfortably functional and infinitely less complex than the named thing itself.

My expired bee is teaching me another, more immediately germane, lesson, though. This lesson is about the people that work at my store, and the way any small, simple, repetitive business is run. Convenient stores work on protocol, you see; sameness is the fuel that runs their engines. Clerks are trained to be droids, assiduously executing a program that we acquire over two or three days of training and then incrementally refine from our own on-the-job experience. A simple, quintessentially repetitive system allows us to work without supervision, which in turn allows store owners to shell out minuscule weekly sums on payroll. We are not trained to ask questions or make difficult decisions, or to take initiative beyond that which we are explicitly asked to do. But it should also be noted that our failure to take such initiative or display ostensible ambition is not, necessarily, indicative of idleness, complacency, or lack of intellect—it is often a measure of self-preservation.

Allow me to explain: general managers of convenient stores, especially locally-owned, mom-and-pop chains, have gone as far as they’re going to go up their respective corporate ladders. So, like any person standing on a platform and looking down, they view anyone climbing the ladder beneath as a threat to be confronted and dispatched. Our store manager, Ethel, has been at her job for 23 years. She’s used to threats; threats get fired. And although no one outside of the tangled confines of her imagination is vying for her job, it is ultimately salient for her subservients to not appear to want her job. Sure, getting sacked from here isn’t the end of the world, but a lot of the people that work the lower rungs of the service industry have certain baggage that makes finding more prestigious jobs a touch difficult: criminal records, inability to pass a drug test, lack of a high school diploma, no references, poor interviewing skills, etc. So rather than find another position at another gas station down the street after a few wageless weeks they can ill-afford, they understandably want to keep this one. And cleaning the office isn’t part of the protocol. Ethel likes to do (or not do) that herself. And so that dead bug just keeps sitting there.

But the ex-bee is lecturing on something else, distinct and yet related: it is elucidating the concept of institutional rot—how good businesses morph into bad ones, how clean homes become squalid and filthy. You see, nothing in a messy apartment or dirty convenient store is ever that different from how matters appeared the day before—just a little nastier, a bit less efficient, than the last version stored in short-term memory. It isn’t as if anyone ever intends to have that disgusting tub-ring, or pink mold in the toilet, or peeling paint, or a rust-speckled car, or a massive belly, or a failed marriage, or a bankrupt commercial enterprise: these things just happen while we aren’t taking the time or exerting the effort to properly maintain the object of concern. The space shuttle Challenger took seven souls to heaven with it in January of 1986 because engineers assigned the (quite obviously) important task of monitoring launch-test simulations tired of getting data back saying that the o-rings were faulty , and assimilated the information, which leads to ignoring information, consequently lowering the bar over time. We all (or at least those old enough to remember) got to see the results of that on national television: NASA—Need Another Seven Astronauts, as the joke going about my grammar school had it.

The failure for anyone else to notice or remove a deceased, hairy, black-and-yellow, winged insect from a shelf in the office of my convenient store will, of course, carry no such implications. Yet while the scale is smaller, the tone and color of those very implications is the same: ignore the upkeep on anything, and sooner or later you will be most unpleasantly surprised by the externalities of that decision, or group of decisions. The retributive cards dealt may be as mundane as an unimpressed visitor to your unkempt home and a dirty office at the gas station, or as poignant as the funerals of spacefarers, but they will be dealt nonetheless.

So I look at that bygone bumblebee, 74 days, and counting, later, and think of a Hindu term badly overused and yet scarcely understood in the West: karma. Karma is popularly portrayed as the idea that your negative (and even positive) actions, or inactions, may come back to bite you in the ass; karma, in its more orthodox understanding in the Hindu faith says that those same actions or inactions will come back to bite you in the ass: you reap what you sow. It is, to Hindus at least, a law as simple and predictable as gravity. And so I wonder what the karma of my staff’s united laziness and inattention is. Plague? War? An unusually rude customer? The slushee machine breaking unexpectedly?

So the bee sits there, long dead and oblivious to the condition of its slowly decaying shell. Bombus americanus didn’t know that it would one day give an entirely different species pause for reflection, because it didn’t know much of anything: it was a bug after all, and God (if you’re into that way of describing things) didn’t give it much awareness of anything besides the needs to pollinate and feed. But I like attempting to discern big ideas by looking at small sources. Call it the scientist in me that never grew to fruition.


A simple pinch of two fingers and a fling into the nearby trash would, of course, make that bit of organic litter go away. But I’m not sure that I want it to go away: its enduring presence has shown me quite a lot about things that I need to know and understand. So I’ll keep this running tally going, maintaining a log on the extent to which a staff of six sentient beings can continue to accommodate a rotting bumblebee in their midst. It has been a college of the everyday—a means to learn without a lesson plan. 74 days and counting.